"Aldiss, Brian W - Short Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

conversed in bulletins that did not ask questions unless
questions were necessary. They walked slightly apart. In
short, they made detours round each other's lives.
"It's really quite easy as long as one is careful," Mrs.
Westermark senior said to Janet. "And dear Jack is so
patient!"
"I even get the feeling he likes the situation."
"Oh, my dear, how could he like such an unfortunate
predicament?"
"Mother, you realise how we all exist together, don't you?
No, it sounds too terrible1 daren't say it."
"Now don't you start getting silly ideas. You've been very
brave, and this is not the time for us to be getting upset, just
as things are going well. If you have any worries, you must
tell Clem. That's what he's here for."
"I know."
"Well then."
She saw Jack walk in the garden. As she looked, he glanced
up, smiled, said something to himself, stretched out a hand,
withdrew it, and went, still smiling, to sit on one end of the
seat on the lawn. Touched, Janet hurried over to the french
windows, to go and join him.
She paused. Already, she saw ahead, saw her sequence of
actions, for Jack had already sketched them into the future.
She would go onto the lawn, call his name, smile, and walk
over to him when he smiled back. Then they would stroll
together to the seat and sit down, one at each end.
The knowledge drained all spontaneity from her. She might
have been working a treadmill, for what she was about to do
had already been done as far as Jack was concerned, yddi his
head start in time. Then if she did not go, if she mutinied,
turned back to the discussion of the day's chores with her
mother-in-law. . . That left Jack mouthing like a fool on the
lawn, indulging in a fantasy there was no penetrating. Let him
do that, let Stackpole see; then they could drop this theory
about Jack's being ahead of time and would have to treat him
for a more normal sort of hallucinatory insanity. He would be
safe in Clem's hands.
But Jack's actions proved that she would go out there. It
was insane for her not to go out there. Insane? To disobey a
law of the universe was impossible, not insane. Jack was not
disobeyinghe had simply tumbled over a law that nobody
knew was there before the first expedition to Mars; certainly
they had discovered something more momentous than anyone
had expected, and more unforeseen. And she had lostNo,
she hadn't lost yet! She ran out onto the lawn, calling to him,
letting the action quell the confusion in her mind.
And in the repeated event there was concealed a little
freshness, for she remembered how his smile, glimpsed
through the window, had held a special warmth, as if he